by Nick Oldham
‘I knew that.’ She smiled. ‘Anyway, the rifling links to a bullet fired in an armed robbery committed last year in Portsea, when a security guard was wounded in a cash-in-transit robbery at a post office on the edge of town. Again, the weapon wasn’t recovered and one male offender made good his escape. Never been caught.’
‘Just one offender?’
‘Seems so.’
‘Unusual for that sort of job; it’s usually a gang.’
Daniels nodded and sipped her latte. It was decaffeinated because she was essentially coffee’d out now.
‘Coming back to Salter,’ she said, ‘I’d say those gaps are what really need to be scrutinized – his whereabouts, who he contacted, etc., and his phone records.’
‘Do the files show what work was done in those respects?’
‘Very little.’
‘Anything about use of bank cards? That could pin him down to a time and place maybe?’
‘Nothing.’
‘It’s often the last person to see the victim alive who is the killer,’ Henry said. ‘Who was that?’
‘His wife, according to the file.’
‘So maybe she has a story to tell that hasn’t been told?’
‘Maybe, but I have read her statement and it does seem a bit … meh … if you get my drift. Woolly.’
‘Let’s get a copy of it and go see her, shall we?’
Back at the station, Saul let them into the room. Henry asked to be given a key, which he almost slammed into Henry’s palm.
‘I’ll keep hold of it from now on,’ Henry informed him. ‘Not that for one moment I think it’s the only key.’
‘It is, actually, so don’t lose it, sir,’ Saul lied.
‘I’ll keep it close to my heart.’
Henry and Daniels watched him leave the room.
Daniels said, ‘Do you think this lot have something to hide, other than general incompetence?’
‘No one likes other people rooting about in their underwear drawer … I know I don’t, but then again, I don’t give anyone cause to do so.’
‘I’ll bet it’s a sight for sore eyes.’
‘Cheeky.’ He smiled at her, liking her a lot: professional, serious yet fun. ‘However, it might be worth—’ He stopped talking abruptly, wondering if he was being excessively paranoid. He dropped his voice to a whisper and continued, ‘Copying everything that might be of interest to us.’
Daniels nodded and whispered back. ‘I’ll find a photocopier and do the whole lot.’
DC Saul was extra whiny when they told him of their intentions. Firstly, he wasn’t happy about them copying anything so sensitive and confidential, and secondly, he didn’t want to provide them with his code for the CID copier because, in an effort to save money, all copying of documents had to be accounted for. The days of free photocopying had long since gone, and the same applied on the other side of the Pennines.
‘I’ll pay a fiver to finance if you want,’ Henry offered.
‘Be ’right,’ he said, leading them to the copier in its own little room.
Daniels copied both sets of files, watched half-lidded by Saul.
‘On your head if any of this gets out,’ he warned them both, drawing a scowl from Henry, who toyed with having a dig at him for insubordination but held back. He had a feeling that, somewhere along the line, this nasty person would trip up.
So they ignored him and, when completed, Daniels took the stack of warm paper back to the room and began to sort it.
‘We’ll need a stapler. With staples,’ Henry told Saul. ‘Obviously I’ll fork out for the staples.’
Later, in Daniels’ Peugeot, Henry skimmed through the file on Salter’s death again and read the statement from his wife (Karen Salter, née Bolton). It told him very little about her or Salter or their life together, just that they’d been married for fifteen years, he ran a haulage business, they were happy, she knew of no enemies, and the last she saw of him was when he left the marital home at about eight a.m. on the day before his death, in the early hours of the morning after. He had gone to work, and it wasn’t unusual for him to work excessive hours. She believed the business was doing OK, wasn’t aware of any problems. There was no mention of his mobile phone.
Salter’s house was in the countryside about eight miles inland from Portsea, set in a stunning, rolling landscape of green fields and woodland. It was a converted barn with a huge, quadruple garage and a covered swimming pool. From a distance, the property looked beautiful, but as Daniels approached up a narrow driveway, it became obvious it had seen better days.
Henry wondered if the house was a clumsy metaphor for a marriage on the rocks. Or was he reading too deeply?
Daniels negotiated several speed humps and drew in outside the front door behind an old BMW.
As they climbed out, a woman came to the door.
She looked to be in her late thirties, close-cropped hair dyed a strange shade of henna red, though Henry thought the label on the bottle might describe it as something more exotic. She was thin, her face gaunt and her dark eyes were unhappy, yet she was still very pretty.
Daniels was closest to her.
‘Mrs Salter?’ she asked, and the woman nodded. Daniels produced her warrant card as Henry joined her, also with his card in his hand. ‘I’m Detective Constable Diane Daniels from the CID and this is Detective Superintendent Henry Christie.’
He flashed his card.
‘We’d like a word with you, please.’ Daniels was pleasant but firm, stating what she wanted as a statement and not giving her any wriggle room.
‘What about?’
‘Your husband’s death.’
Henry had seen the reaction on the faces of many relatives of victims of terrible violence he’d had to re-interview about cases over the years. Usually they were sick of the cops, sick of answering questions, just somehow wanted to believe their loved ones were really still alive and they could return to normality – or, having come to the point of accepting the death, just could not bear having the wounds reopened.
The three of them sat at the kitchen table.
Mrs Salter had made them a mug of tea each.
‘Mrs Salter, we’re so sorry to have to go through this with you again,’ Daniels said.
She looked resigned to the inevitable. ‘That’s OK, I suppose.’
‘Can I call you Karen?’
‘Yes, that’s fine.’
The two detectives, Henry suspected, were about to open an old wound.
They spent an hour with her going through Tom’s movements, but there was nothing she could tell them about after he set off for work that fateful day. He did have a mobile phone and she gave them the number, though Daniels knew it was in the file. Beyond that, there was very little information. The marriage was one of those ‘brother and sister’ things, and his business was very much hand to mouth, chasing money all the time, and she saw little of him.
They thanked her and left. Henry asked Daniels to drive him to the infirmary so he could find the public mortuary.
‘So what have we learned?’ he asked Daniels.
‘Er … middling marriage, business kept him busy … and still a yawning gap that’s unexplained. He had a phone, but no info on that as such, so that needs to be clarified with Runcie, I’d say. And Mrs Salter is a sad woman who did not love her husband, just tolerated life.’
‘Female intuition?’
‘Just obvious.’
‘Let me ask you a question.’
‘Go on.’
‘How many people, even serious business folk, leave for work at eight in the morning and are still working after midnight – legitimately?’
‘Very few, I’d say.’
They had reached the end of the long drive at this point.
‘Over sixteen hours,’ Henry said, and they looked at each other. ‘Nothing to say where he was during that time? Was he a man covering his tracks, do you think?’
‘That lady back at the house isn’t t
elling us everything.’
Daniels reversed all the way back up the drive. The two detectives knocked on the door again but got no reply.
Daniels tried the door handle: locked.
‘Maybe she’s having a bath,’ Henry said.
Daniels knocked harder, louder, then crouched down at the letter box to peer in. ‘Nothing.’
They walked the perimeter of the house, shading their eyes to look through ground-floor windows, but could not see her.
‘Odd,’ Daniels observed.
Henry swivelled slowly and looked at the garage block which might once have been a hay storage barn, he guessed.
Daniels set off ahead of him, aiming for the side door of this building, leaving the less-than-agile Henry hobbling in her wake. She pushed open the door and stepped inside.
Daniels’ scream for help made Henry forget his aches and pains, and he turned his hobble into a sprint.
The disfigured body of Martin Sowerbutts lay naked on the mortuary slab. His face was mashed beyond any way of identifying him, though fortunately he did have his driving licence with him, and Runcie confirmed that he had been wearing the same clothes he’d had on when he’d been released from custody the day before. Dental record checks would come later.
That clothing had been stripped from him and bagged up.
Henry saw that Sowerbutts’ chest had been crushed, probably by impact with the steering wheel of the vehicle he’d driven over the cliff.
When Henry had entered the mortuary, Runcie was in hushed conversation with the Home Office pathologist. She saw Henry’s arrival but continued the conflab with the pathologist, and Henry assumed she was briefing him on the circumstances of the death.
Eventually the conversation ended. Runcie turned to Henry, who asked, ‘How’s it going?’
‘Progressing. He had no known next of kin, so the coroner has accepted my ID of him for the sake of the PM,’ she said. ‘I’m told you had an incident with Tom Salter’s wife,’ she accused him.
‘You could say that.’
‘I thought you were here to review two unsolved cases, not go raking muck and driving already unbalanced people to attempt terrible things. If you’d asked, I could have told you she was on the edge.’
‘I’ll pretend I haven’t heard that, DCI Runcie,’ Henry said frostily.
Their eyes had a fleeting moment of fiery jousting, then both turned away as the pathologist began speaking into the microphone dangling above the body on the slab.
‘My name is Professor David Wrackham and I am a Home Office pathologist. I am about to commence a post-mortem on Martin Sowerbutts. The circumstances of his death, as outlined to me by the police, are as follows …’
TWELVE
Diane Daniels sat beside a hospital bed in one of the bays in the A&E department at the Royal Portsea Infirmary, looking wretchedly at the sleeping form of Karen Salter. A drip fed into the woman’s right arm and an oxygen tube ran under her nostrils, assisting her rasping breathing.
Daniels could still vividly see Karen’s body hanging from the noose slung over one of the steel rafters in the garage, the upended chair on the floor below her dangling feet, which she had climbed on to before putting the noose around her neck, the plastic bag over her head and then kicked it away from underneath herself.
Daniels had opened the door as the chair tipped over and Karen’s slim body dropped on the noose, drawing a horrific gasp from the poor woman. Almost instantly, her legs began to dance the jig of death by hanging. The fall of the noose wasn’t enough to break her neck but she would have slowly strangled herself and suffocated from the plastic bag, which she sucked into her face.
In all, a very serious attempt at suicide.
Daniels screamed for Henry as she raced into the garage, grabbed Karen’s legs, encompassing them with her arms, trying to take her weight and raise her.
Henry clattered through the door a moment later, instantly took in the scene and hurtled across.
‘I’ll do that,’ he said. ‘You sort the rope and the bag.’
He took over from Daniels, embraced Karen’s legs at her thighs, then braced himself, knowing this was going to hurt a lot. Daniels pulled the chair upright and clambered on to it, whipping the plastic bag off Karen’s head, which made her draw breath involuntarily. Her eyes shot open like some sort of zombie doll, and she moaned, ‘Let me die.’
Daniels suddenly had a small pen knife in her hand, which was attached to her keyring.
‘You got her?’ she asked Henry.
‘Yeaaah,’ he groaned, the pain in his shoulder ferocious.
Daniels reached up behind Karen’s head and began sawing at the cord, which was a length of washing line, not easy to hack through with the tiny knife blade because of the inner thread of flexible steel cord, but she kept at it until she cut through, then caught Karen’s upper body and, between her and Henry, they lowered her to the ground. Daniels eased the cord from around her neck.
Karen sobbed uncontrollably.
Daniels propped her up, took hold of her and gently embraced her, stroked her, telling her everything was going to be OK.
Meanwhile, Henry was dialling treble nine, asking for an ambulance.
In the hospital bed, Karen opened her caked-up eyes slowly.
‘You should have let me die,’ she said. ‘I have nothing to live for.’
Henry watched the post-mortem, one of many he had attended from his early days as a young probationer, all the way through his career to becoming an SIO. He had learnt many things about the human body from these.
Usually during a PM he would be watching closely, asking questions of the pathologist, showing interest. But he stood back from this one. It was not his job, nor had he been offered any protective clothing. He did, however, stalk a full circle around the slab in the centre of the room as the pathologist began his investigation of Sowerbutts’ chest, eventually exposing and lifting out the cracked, crushed ribcage and broken sternum, injuries consistent with having been at the wheel of a vehicle going over the edge of a cliff. The bones reminded Henry of an archaeological dig.
He stood a little further back as the professor cut out the lungs and lifted the sloppy organs across to the dissecting table, placing them there like a huge, dead bird, talking as he did so, explaining his process as he sliced the lungs section by section.
Henry saw the blood seep from the sponge-like tissue, trying to hear what the man was saying.
He also watched Runcie, who was standing close to Wrackham, accidentally, Henry supposed, but regularly obscuring the view.
She was asking questions softly, persistently, but Henry could not hear them.
The next major thing was to investigate Sowerbutts’ skull, an operation which entailed – after Wrackham had closely inspected the facial injuries – paring away and peeling back the skin to reveal the bone structure underneath, then removing the clearly very badly damaged skull itself using a bone saw that reminded Henry of a pizza cutter, slicing off the top like a boiled egg and revealing the visibly damaged brain underneath.
Sowerbutts was a terrible mess.
Yet there was something playing on Henry’s mind.
After just over two hours, a mortuary attendant threw Sowerbutts’ organs back into the empty cadaver he had become, then refitted the sliced-up brain into his head, put the skull cap on and pulled the skin and scalp back over it. He then replaced the ribcage and sewed up the chest. Now, with his features even more distorted, and the criss-cross sewing, Sowerbutts looked something like Frankenstein’s monster, just on a smaller scale.
‘Cause of death,’ the pathologist declared as he washed off, ‘massive brain trauma consistent with having been involved in a serious vehicle accident.’
‘Consistent with having taken his own life?’ Runcie asked.
‘Unfortunately I cannot tell you what his mental state was,’ Wrackham said. ‘That will be up to the evidence collected around the tragic event and the outcome of a coroner’s
inquest.’
‘Thanks, Professor,’ Runcie said, then looked at Henry. ‘No mystery then, and a dangerous child killer off the streets without recourse to a costly trial.’
Henry’s mouth twisted sardonically as something unsettling flitted through his thoughts like a dark shadow.
Now he had a couple of things on his mind that he could not quite seem to grasp. He put it down to the ageing process, the slowing down of his faculties, though he still had a strange faith in himself that he would get there in the end.
Something Runcie had said previously.
Something he’d seen during the post-mortem.
Unsettling ‘somethings’.
He bumped into Daniels in a corridor close to the A&E department. She looked relieved to see him.
‘Henry, I hope you don’t mind this,’ she said, and without warning gave him a quick hug, through which he could feel tension judder out of her. As she pulled away, she said, ‘Is it always this much fun working with you?’
‘Sometimes it has its moments,’ he admitted. ‘How is Mrs Salter?’
‘Sleeping now. Been very emotional, as you’d expect.’
‘And was our unsaid assumption correct?’
Daniels nodded and puffed out her cheeks. ‘She thought her husband was having an affair but doesn’t know with whom.’
‘Does she have a suspect?’
‘Yeah, Salter’s accountant. But how have you gone on?’
Henry jarred as one of those elusive ‘somethings’ clicked in his brain. ‘I need to make a phone call,’ he said. ‘An urgent one.’ Then, reacting to Daniels’ puzzled expression, he said, ‘I’m no pathologist, but I’m pretty sure Martin Sowerbutts was murdered.’
It was almost six p.m. when Henry and Daniels met in the hospital corridor and decided they’d had enough for that particular day, to get showered and change their clothes, then meet in the bar for a drink and a meal.
Henry planned to stretch out on the bed in his underpants and ease his aching body and soul for half an hour, which became an hour before he jerked awake when his mobile phone rang.
‘Henry, my man, you left a message for me to contact you.’ It was his old friend Professor Baines, the Home Office pathologist who covered the Lancashire area and who, Henry knew, had performed the post-mortem on John Burnham. The two men went way back and had developed a good relationship verging on friendship, and they’d had many conversations over many a pint after post-mortems to discuss sudden death. Baines had also always been interested in Henry’s once very complicated love life, but since he had turned over a new leaf, Baines seemed to find him a little dull. That said, Baines obviously knew of Henry’s current situation. ‘You need some advice from an old tom cat?’ Baines asked, which Henry thought was quite rich: Baines wasn’t even a kitten. ‘A few days away with a young lady? I’d say go for it – you only live once. What happens in Central Yorkshire, etc., etc.’